What I Read on Summer Vacation, Part I

THE FALSE FRIEND by Myla Goldberg. When as an adult Celia recovers a memory of a childhood tragedy that contradicts what she told the police so many years ago, she returns to her hometown to confess the truth. But in this book, Goldberg explores just how elusive and malleable memory and truth can be in the face of time, demonstrating the lengths people will go to hide from unpleasantness, both the world’s and their own.

While this book may be less enchanting than Goldberg's debut novel, Bee Season, it is infinitely more haunting and plausible. This title will be available in September from Doubleday Books. (NB: My sales rep, Ann Kingman, told me that Doubleday is interested in using my shelf talker for some of their online publicity, which pleases me to no end!)

THE WIDOWER’S TALE by Julia Glass. Julia Glass follows classic tradition, proving once again that family is the original source of comedy, tragedy, and frustration. Her newest novel is a meditation on love, both filial and romantic, and how hopelessly ridiculous we are destined to become if we don’t make the efforts to temper our passions with reason or our actions with accountability.

Glass is one of the best writers out there for exploring the nuances and quirks of interpersonal relationships and this book fits into her pantheon neatly. This book will be available in September from Pantheon Books. Interestingly, I chose "pantheon" in the above sentence before looking up the publisher for this one and decided to leave it since it was such a nifty coincidence.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, part I

June 2010 Grenada & Anguilla

Travel Day 1:

Travel on American nonstop Hartford to San Juan—totally full flight, unfortunately with a high proportion of screaming and otherwise badly behaved children (at what point did it become acceptable to watch portable DVD players with no headphones?). With the ridiculous layover that comes with the Grenada transfers, for the last few trips we’ve opted to leave the airport for a leisurely lunch at Pamela’s Restaurant, part of Numero Uno Guesthouse. This year we opted to save a bit on taxi fare by staying a little closer to the airport and chose to give our custom to the Ocean Bar & Grill at the Ritz Carlton instead. I had called ahead a few days before our departure to see if it was possible as a non-guest to spend a few hours there enjoying a long luncheon and I was assured that we would be very welcomed, indeed. In fact, we were. Now, resorts are not our first choice for accommodations, and even if they were, the Ritz would in all likelihood be beyond our means for a two-week-long vacation (not to mention that it’s all a little too, well, corporate for our tastes). But if the San Juan location is representative of the chain, after our afternoon there, I can totally see why people are devoted to the brand. No staff member, from the concierge to the hostess to the busboys, could do enough for us. To a person, they were pleasant, congenial, and professional. Before being seated, we mentioned that we would be hanging out for about 3 hours and that we would be happy, therefore, not to take the first row of tables closest to the sand and the view. Nonsense, they said! We were the first to arrive for lunch and therefore must have our pick of tables. So we settled in with our books and backpacks to enjoy the view and the ambience.

Sonny was our server and she was delightful, checking in with us just often enough that we could add another beverage to our tab, but not so often that it felt pushy or that she was rushing us. Really, she had an uncanny sense of timing. We ordered an appetizer of chips & salsa to share, the kosher foot long hot dog (DH), the Puerto Rican Cobb salad (me), an ice cream, one iced tea, one Medalla (the local light beer), one Diet Coke, and two lattes. With the exception of the Medalla, which was a whopping $6 (really? for a local beer?!), everything else was priced slightly less than I would have expected for such an upmarket location. Our total before tip came to $72. (For comparison purposes, our meal at Pamela’s the year before for a comparable number of drinks and amount of food, came to $91. It just so happened that the mini notepad I was using for this trip had last year’s trip tallies still in it.)

Help me--I'm sideways!

We took a taxi back to the airport a little after 3:00 (fare is $10 each way, plus $1 per suitcase) and hunkered down in the terminal to bide our time for another few hours. Between reading and people-watching, the time actually went pretty quickly. We boarded the American Eagle flight (all but two seats were filled) around 6:00 for an on-time departure with our noses still buried in our books, so even the two hour flight went by quickly. DH was absorbed in the new behemoth Vietnam novel called Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes while I was involved with Julia Glass’s forthcoming novel called The Widower’s Tale. I had started Paul Harding’s Tinkers that morning, and while the beauty of the language really struck me, the story itself did not, so I put it down until I could devote more attention to it.

Once we landed, it took very little time to make it through immigration, grab our checked luggage, and then maneuver through customs. Outside Jude, a friend of our hosts, was waiting to drive us to our villa, the charming and ever-so-reasonably-priced Turtleback Pavilion. Low season rates here are always a good value, but because of the economy, the owners were offering 30% off the rack rates this summer. Spice Isle Villas or Reef View Grenada to see the websites. Our fourth visit to Grenada and our third stay at that villa (on one of our trips we traveled with friends and stayed at the larger, sister villa of Tradewinds, found at the same websites above), so clearly we’re devoted fans. Almost 16 hours exactly from the time we left for the airport that morning we tumbled into bed, filled with that odd combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that so often accompanies travel days.

Grenada Day 1

It might be a gigantic pain in the ass to have such a long travel day, and I ain’t sayin’ that I wouldn’t rather get to Grenada in a more timely manner, but boy howdy—there is a real and certain reward for landing on the island well past sunset, and that is waking up to its sunlit splendor first thing in the morning.

Our hosts, Anthon and Sharon Antoine, had done some light provisioning for us ahead of our arrival, so after the usual exclamations over the beauty of our surroundings and our great good fortune to be there, we immediately set about making coffee before heading out to the pool. One of the best things about Turtleback is the number of nooks tucked around the villa for reading & relaxing, so there’s always an option to be social or solitary, in the sun or in the shade. Between the main level and the rooftop lounge there are two pairs of padded Adirondack chairs, two padded sets of chaises longues, three sets of tables & chairs for dining, two rocking chairs, and a set of the most amazing padded swings whose backs can adjust up or down like a chaise longue. It’s truly a limer’s paradise!

A bit more about the villa: it’s an open plan studio with a king-size bed, a compact but complete kitchen, and a full-size day bed all sharing the living space with a compact bathroom off to the side. French doors on three sides can be thrown wide open, but the best part of the villa is the outdoor living space. There’s a swimming pool big enough to actually swim in, surrounded by mature foliage, plus the rooftop deck with wet bar, which has lovely views over the bay and out to the Atlantic. For a couple traveling without friends or children, I don’t believe there’s any better value for that level of comfort and style on the entire island.

Shawn, from Y&R car rentals, showed up shortly after 9:00 to drop off our two-door Toyota with four-wheel drive and get our paperwork taken care of. Since we were just sitting down for breakfast when he arrived, we invited him to join us. After the rental was squared away, we decided to put off our grocery shopping for a couple of hours and just relax around the villa instead. If we had known that our first day would be our only day of sunshine on Grenada, no doubt we would have enjoyed it even more.

At noon we cleaned ourselves up and headed to our favorite decadent place for lunch on Grenada—Spice Island Beach Resort. If we were resort people, this is exactly the kind of place we would be drawn to—gracious, open-aired, and unmistakably islandy. As always, the service was charming and the food was excellent, but this year we noticed two differences: the dearth of guests and the slightly increased menu prices. One local salad, one lamb roti appetizer, one smoked salmon sandwich, one order of ice cream, two Tings and one frozen fruit punch took our total to EC $166, including tax and service charge. Now I understand that that translates to less money than we’d spent on lunch at the Ritz the previous day, but it still felt higher than usual, particularly for the small portions served.

After lingering for a while over our books, we left Spice Island to head over for some grocery shopping at the IGA in Spiceland Mall. It’s a tad more expensive than the Food Fair closer to St. George’s, but we have always found the selection to be greater here. A brief pause to buy some mangos from a guy under a tree in the parking lot and then we headed back “home,” where we spent the day in a circuit of swimming, sunning, and relaxing on those marvelous swings.

Dinner found us at Charcoal’s, a new BBQ restaurant in Lanse Aux Epines, just down the road from our villa. It’s clean and casual and fun, not to mention reasonably priced. DH selected the grilled lambi platter while I opted for the babyback rib platter, each accompanied by our choice of 2 sides. One beer, one rum punch, and one order of ice cream brought our total to EC $101, or about $38 in US. They also offer take out, which seemed to be a popular choice the night we were there.

Charcoals in LAE

Another early night back to the villa for more reading and then bedtime—I finished Myla Goldberg’s forthcoming book, The False Friend.

Stay tuned for Part II

Some lighter options for summer reading

It's no secret that I tend to be drawn to darker, literary tomes that carry some weight, both literally and figuratively, but what's less known is what a colleague of mine (not from my store, will remain nameless) refers to as my "book slumming." (She's hardcore when it comes to her reading. If there's even a hint of commercialism, she's not likely to pick it up.) I don't see it as slumming, actually. When there are so few people out there who make reading a priority in our lives, why on earth would we want want to denigrate readers who read books written by authors who will never, ever win a literary prize?

Which leads me to my post today. Books for entertainment. Books for fun. Books that might even be, dare I say it, funny. Perfect for those days when you don't really want to be burdened with more depressing insights into the human condition. These are not books where you will be blown away by the beautiful prose stylings of the artiste.

Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire by Margot Berwin, published by Vintage in paperback. A woman recovering from a divorce reluctantly gets involved in helping a friend search the Yucatan peninsula for nine plants with a mythical collective power. Along the way she encounters an ethereal orchid grower, a mystical marijuana cultivator, and a man who will stop at nothing to get the nine plants first. In this delightfully distracting read, the author takes us for a romp that is equal parts romance, adventure, magical realism, and self-discovery. It’s a colorful, frothy, well-paced novel perfect for summer escapist reading. Think any of the Indiana Jones movies or Romancing the Stone and you'll have a pretty good idea where this book is coming from.

The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian, published in paperback by Harper. Ella and John, a couple in their 80s, want to experience one last hurrah. Despite their children's horror and their doctors' warnings (she has late-stage cancer and he has Alzheimer's), they head west in their RV on Route 66 in search of lost time. Full of laughter and poignant moments, this book is a reminder that a life well-lived to the very end is a rare, sweet thing, indeed.


Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith and Jane Austen, published in paperback by Quirk Books. If you thought Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was just a tantalizing in media res novel, this is the book for you. You'll discover Br. Bennet's dark past, uncover the secret of the unholy plague, and swoon with Elizabeth Bennet's debut is interrupted by a legion of the undead! Good fun all around.

You've got to pick a memoir or two...

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen by Jennifer Steil, published by Broadway Books. What starts as a 3-week course teaching journalism to a group of greenhorn reporters in Yemen quickly evolves into a year-long stint as editor-in-chief of the English language newspaper, The Yemen Observer. Bewildered and smitten in equal measure with her new surroundings, Steil faces obstacles as varied as stampedes, kidnapings, and suicide bombings. But what intrigues this intrepid journalist the most is her status as "third gender" -- as a Westerner, she is free to mingle with either men or women in a country where the sexes are still strictly segregated (even at wedding ceremonies, the bride and groom are not permitted to be with each other). This memoir is both instructive and engaging, teaching this reader, at least, much about Yemeni food, culture, customs and government as Steil encounters them for the first time. A fascinating read.

The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life by Ann Vanderhoof, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Everybody who knows me knows that reading, travel, and eating are my three greatest passions, and I can’t recall the last time reading a book made me as happy as this one did, as it fed all three. Unlike many travel & food writers who never stray beyond the glossy tourist areas, Vanderhoof is the real deal, seeking out and sharing the best, most authentic, down-home island recipes and experiences—whether it’s scampering after thyme-grazing goats on a Dominican mountainside, or pounding out conch with Grenadian fishermen, or learning how to “whine & shuffle” her way through a Trinidadian Carnival covered in mud, paint and sweat (and possibly other bodily fluids). I swear, you’ll scent the nutmeg wafting on the breeze as you read this book, the next best thing to sailing the West Indies yourself!

Packing for summer vacation

Packing for summer vacation is no easy feat for me. Oh, the clothes aren't really an issue. We go to the Caribbean, so two pairs of capris, four bathing suits and some sarongs or coverups, snorkel gear, some tops to mix & match, and a couple of pairs of sandals are all I need. If I'm feeling fancy, I'll toss in a sundress, too. Before the days of the shoe bomber, we even got away with doing carry-on only, even for a two week vacation, but these days we generally check an additional bag with our various liquids and unguents, namely sunscreen.


No, the hard part of packing for me is paring down the list of books that I take with me. Last year I set a personal best of reading 19 books over 15 days. I don't think I'll necessarily match that this year, but I intend to pack at least 16 books for the same amount of time. And since I like having these things planned well in advance, today is the day I've dedicated to reading the first few pages or first chapter of a couple dozen books to determine which ones make the cut. The only thing worse than running out of books on summer vacation is being stuck with duds.

I try to bring at least one non-fiction title, but then my fiction really runs the gamut. I'll take short stories and novels, big thick tomes and slender volumes, typical beach reads and books so dark that the only place to read them in comfort is in the dazzling tropical sunlight. It's also a time for me to both catch up on backlist (previously published) reading and read ahead, courtesy of advance reader's copies, for the books that are coming out in the fall. This is also the first year that I'm lucky enough to have a Sony e-Reader. I don't know how easy it will be to read its non-backlit screen in the bright sunlight, especially whilst wearing my polarized shades, but we'll give it the ol' college try.

On my list of definites (at least so far):

The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall
Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Great House by Nicole Krauss
The Tower, the Zoo & the Tortoise by Julia Stuart
Tinkers by Paul Harding
The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass
Jellicoe Road by Marlina Marchetta (for young adults)
Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
The Woman with the Bouquet by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer


I still need a nonfiction book to take with me. Any recommendations?

Some debut novels I recently read & enjoyed

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei. Lin Yulan, a revolutionary leader of the Chinese feminist movement, reluctantly returns to her homeland after years of self-imposed exile for a guided tour of "the new China" with her two daughters and three granddaughters in an effort for the nearly estranged women to reconnect. Each woman arrives in China with her own agenda, and each discovers that some shameful secrets are simply too heavy to bear alone. This powerful, intricately woven first novel is a meditation on grief & recovery, strength & vulnerability, and the urgency to leave one's mark on the world. A very promising debut.

The author graduated from Amherst College, just down the road from our bookstore, and she very graciously stopped by our store one day to sign stock while she was visiting her alma mater. The sales rep had emailed her the above blurb that I wrote for their publicity department and she was very appreciative--there are so many first time writers whose works get overlooked that she seemd grateful for our store's efforts to promote her book. I really look forward to her future work. Penguin published this book new in hardcover in the spring and I hope by the time it's released in paper that it will find the audience it deserves! It would be a very good book group selection.

Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaze Mengiste is a debut novel set in the writer's homeland of Ethiopia during the 1974 military overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. As famine, chaos, and suspicion sweep the nation, one family becomes wrapped up in chaos of its own. When the matriarch dies, father becomes pitted against sons, brother against brother, and husband against wife, each deciding where his or her loyalties lie, both within the family and in the context of the political turmoil exploding around them. This moving book takes the intimate story of one family's struggle to survive a new regime and places it against the backdrop of important world events.

This book puts me very much in mind of my favorite novel of the last several years--Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. And not just because it's the story of one man's personal loss echoed in the devastations of his country--there are some absolutely beautiful phrases and startling insights about this famine-stricken nation, "a desolate valley, the sun too bright for shadows of death." Published by Norton in January 2010.

May is National Short Story Month!

It's been a bit too long since my last blogpost--but I couldn't let National Short Story Month pass us by without telling you about two of my favorite short story collections!


I don't read very much short fiction, as I prefer to really sink my teeth into a book and get absorbed by its world. However, if all short stories were as good as Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's collection called The Most Beautiful Book in the World, I would have to change my reading habits. These stories are exquisite, elegant, and enchanting--perfect little gems of literature that explore the nature of happiness across age, gender, and class boundaries. Each story left me with a sigh of satisfaction and contentment.


When I was on the WAMC Rountable for book discussion, I jokingly referred to Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders as "the best book you probably haven't heard of" from 2009. Not only has it been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Commonwealth Award, and been named winner for the 2009 Story Prize Award, it has appeared on the Top 10 list of publications as varied as The Economist, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Time. Yet when I handsell it to customers, they inevitably say, "Who?" This brilliant debut is a collection of interrelated stories set mostly in around the town of Lahore, Pakistan. The book takes an unflinching look at the class system, but there is also a real delicacy of detail and a rich sense of place. We get stories about servants and the wealthy, the virtuous and the wicked, young lovers and bickering siblings--and all in a direct language that speaks to both the heart and the mind.

Love in the time of Victoria...Queen Victoria, that is.

I have been meaning to post about this book for the last few months, as it was a book I mentioned on the radio for the Round Table book discussion on WAMC back in January, but I'm afraid real life derailed the blog for a while. But noticing the display of Lewis Carroll books at the Odyssey today prompted me to dig this up to post.

ALICE I HAVE BEEN by Melanie Benjamin is a new(ish) hardcover novel that is the ingenious imagining of the inner life of Alice Liddell, the real life little girl who was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Now I have to confess that I’m a huge fan of the Alice classics--I read the books so often in my childhood that I took to reading them backwards AND upside-down just to keep things interesting. The poem "Jabberwocky" was the first poem I ever memorized (quite possibly the only poem I ever memorized) and I can recite it to this day, but this novel is so vividly imagined and compellingly told that you wouldn’t have to be obsessed with Lewis Carroll to reap lots of enjoyment from the novel. It opens in 1932 when Alice is an old woman, reflecting on her life and how the public identification as Alice in Wonderland has affected her. The author deftly interweaves known facts into the fantasy of her conjectured story, and my curiosity was roused to the point that I actually did a few Google searches to sift through the narrative for fact vs. fancy (Alice did meet Queen Victoria's youngest son whilst he was attending Oxford, but there's no evidence that he courted her, for one example).

I found Alice Liddell’s childhood the most compelling section, where we see her interactions with Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician who would go on to write the Alice books under the psyeudonym of Lewis Carroll. The author does an amazing job of maintaining a very delicate balance between a sweet, avuncular relationship and a predatory relationship between the two, and it’s clear that however ambiguous their friendship is to the outside world, the two of them find mutual comfort and understanding with each other.

It’s the section where Alice is a young woman that is so heartbreaking to me, which picks up several years after the rift between Dodgson and the Liddell family. Tired of overanalyzing the relationship that shocked the entire Oxford community, Alice retreats into the comfort of hazy memories and finding order in the strict ideas of Victorian fashion and decorum, preferring not to dwell on that universal great mystery of just how narrow the chasm is that separates childhood from adulthood. Ultimately this spellbinding novel is a meditation on the sorrows and losses on both sides of that chasm, which makes it such a satisfying read.

Close encounter with another favorite author!

April 15 is a date most Americans dread, but 2010 is a year that I, for one, will have happy memories of Tax Day. I was fortunate enough to meet Yann Martel at the NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) offices in Arlington, MA, who was in town doing an event at a Boston-area bookstore. Michael Kindness, one of our sales reps from Random House, arranged for the opportunity for us to get books signed, so while the Odyssey Bookshop wasn't able to book Martel for an event of our own, we could still get signed books for our customers, particularly those in our First Editions Club. (Give us a call or visit our website at www.odysseybks.com to order a signed one--limited quantities!)

Yann Martel signs his new book. To the tune of about 350 copies!

I eagerly devoured Beatrice and Virgil a couple of months ago in the Advance Reader's Editionformat, having loved Martel's previous novel. As with Life of Pi, Martel puts animal allegory to good use again, layered over a postmodern meta-fiction structure. Ostensibly about a writer named Henry who has lost his creativity after hitting it big with a critically-acclaimed AND commercially successful novel, the book is actually an exploration of how inadequate words are to describe the Holocaust. In fact, Martel suggests, the only way one can convey the true horrors of this world is by coming at them obliquely, not directly. This novel is so haunting and provocative that I could not stop thinking of it for days.

You know how it feels impossible to describe the look, feel, and taste of a food another person has never encountered? There is a seven page passage of this novel that will serve as the ruler against which all future food descriptions will be measured and found wanting, in which Virgil (a Howler monkey) describes to Beatrice (a donkey) *exactly* the various aspects that give a pear its "pearness." This passage alone stands out, but there are dozens more, scattered throughout, that highlight Martel's facility with prose that is beautiful, concise, and often cutting.

By the time I got to the epilogue, the Games for Gustav section, I felt utterly sucker-punched. I read the Games section hurriedly straight through the first time. The second time I paused and considered the implications of each game through Virgil's & Beatrice's eyes. The third time I read it, tears coursed down my cheeks, as the utter impossibility of answering each question of the games really began to sink in. This book is as serious, agonizing, visceral, and immediate an encounter with the Holocaust as I've ever experienced, in book or film format.

Here's a shot of Martel and me after most of the books had been signed.

I turn to fiction when I want to understand...

I work in the nearby town of South Hadley, MA, which made national news recently with the sad, sad story of a young high school girl from the local high school who committed suicide. It later came out that she had been bullied relentlessly by her peers, both physically & verbally, and even online. Allegedly a number of the bullies even bragged about how miserable they made the poor girl's life. I'm a good 20 years removed from high school myself, and while I never experienced the cruelty that Ms. Phoebe Prince suffered, I recently read a young adult novel that enabled me to relive every taunt, every nasty aside, even the few (minor) physical assaults that accompanied me through middle school and high school:

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I’LL BE DEAD by Julie Anne Peters. Daelyn Rice is a girl bullied by her peers and misunderstood by her parents when she discovers a website called Through-the-Light. There she meets other teens who are assigned a “Date of Determination,” a date by which, if their lives do not improve, they plan to commit suicide. Follow Daelyn as the website counts down to her D.O.D and she recalls the endless stream of abuse from her school peers and her "Fat Camp" counselors--abuse that the perpetrators intimidated her not to reveal. This raw, horrifying and tragic book couldn’t come at a more pertinent time to our community, mourning a similar loss. If you think bullying is no big deal, read this book and think again. It's corrosive, damaging and pervasive.